The first Ferris Wheel, at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. It was 264 ft. high.

Guy de Maupassant is said to have lunched at the Eiffel Tower every day so that he could avoid looking at the edifice he so despised, and he wasn’t the only Parisian intellectual to hate on Gustave Eiffel’s “bridge to the sky.” French artists and thinkers railed against the tower even as it was in its planning stages as part of the Universal Exposition of 1889, claiming that it was a blight on the city.

But the Eiffel Tower was a huge hit during the fair, so much so that the planners of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago felt that they needed to do something dramatic to compete with it. Daniel H. Burnham, Chief of Construction for the Columbian, searched futilely for an answer for a long time before George Ferris supplied him with one. An excerpt from Henry Petroski’s Remaking the World:

Burnham found himself at a banquet addressing architects and engineers, he praised the former but excoriated the latter for not having met the expectations of the people. Nothing had been proposed that displayed the originality or novelty to rival the Eiffel Tower. He wanted something new in engineering science, but felt the engineers were giving him only towers.

George Washington Gale Ferris, Jr.

Among the engineers at the banquet was the youngish George Washington Gale Ferris, Jr. He was born in Galesburg, Illinois, in 1859, and at the age of five moved with his family to western Nevada. There, while living on a ranch, he became fascinated with a large undershot water wheel, which raised buckets out of the Carson River to supply a trough for the horses. Ferris would later recall his fascination with the wheel’s action, but, according to some accounts, as a youngster he was not equally fascinated with formal education. … When Ferris would later be asked where the idea for his great wheel came from, he recalled that, a while after hearing Burnham’s challenge, he found himself at a Saturday afternoon dinner club made up mainly of world’s fair engineers.

According to Ferris, “I had been turning over every proposition I could think of. On four or five of these I had spent considerable time. What were they? Well, perhaps I’d better not say. Any way none of them were very satisfactory… It was at one of these dinners, down at a Chicago chop house, that I hit on the idea. I remember remarking that I would build a wheel, a monster. I got some paper and began sketching it out. I fixed the size, determined the construction, the number of cars we would run, the number of people it would hold, what we would charge, the plan of stopping six times in its first revolution and loading, and then making a complete turn–in short, before the dinner was over I had sketched out almost the entire detail, and my plan has never varied an item from that day. The wheel stands at the Plaissance at this moment as it stood before me then.”•